McDermott & McGough : a history of photography /

As a collaborative artist team, McDermott and McGough exemplify contemporary art practice by dismissing boundaries that time and history have established, mining the history of art as a means to illuminate the present. Their aesthetic strategies are representative of other late-20th-century artists, specifically British artists Gilbert and George. McDermott and McGough's work is painterly, photographic, and performative, and these three modes of work are inextricably bound together. How these artists present themselves becomes as much a part of the art as the art object itself. The present volume consists of a series of calm, static photographic images that go beyond direct references to literally mimic 19th-century photographic practice of still life, portraiture, landscape, and nude, reproduced in the 19th-century processes of gum bichromate, cyanotype, salt, and platinotype. In a playful introductory essay, Durant celebrates both the irony and camp that sews the photographs and artistic strategies together. Beautifully designed in its simplicity, the book includes a selected bibliography chronicling the artists, their published work, an exhibition history, and a detailed list of the 73 photographs reproduced in color, in the first retrospective monograph of their photographic work. Undergraduates through professionals; two-year technical program students. J. Natal; Columbia College (IL)

Contemporary artists McDermott & McGough are best known for their sumptuous "archaic" photographs or, perhaps, for their continued insistence on living in the past. The first assumption is unfortunate, the second untrue. Arena's book, reproducing 73 cyanotypes, palladium, and gum bichromate prints in the highest quality allows one to understand the photographs' popularity. The mixture of such delicate processes and the superficially nostalgic contentÄhigh romantic tableaus, still lifes, and mimicry of famous artworksÄcreate alluring pieces. But the paintings and graphic works in the exhibition catalog from Stichting Kunstboek add a depth of meaning to the photographs that Durant's fine essay cannot. We begin to understand that each work is more a manifesto than a souvenir. As for the second assumption, it is true that the pair dress in vintage garb, live in an apartment with antique fixtures, and produce their art using old-fashioned methods. But they are not trying to "live in the past" so much as they are trying to alter the present, raise questions about the nature of progress, and fight the evils they foresee in the future. Their purposeful contradictions become apparent in the duo's art in the second bookÄmore than 150 full-color reproductions, roughly one-third photographs. Combining Gilbert & George's mastery of the couple as artist and Josef Beuys's manipulation of public/private iconography, McDermott & McGough are among the most noteworthy of young American artists. The Stichting Kunstboek publication is an affordable and important acquisition for any library with an interest in contemporary art; Arena's book, with better reproductions, belongs in large photography collections. [Yes, the name is spelled MacDermott in the second title, but not in the text or the other book.ÄEd.]ÄEric Bryant, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.